A good rule of thumb is to consider a stash of 500 bullets as a starting point for your gun. It may seem tall, but it goes fast. Of those 500 rounds, at least 150 should be defensive, not targeted. If you can afford to hide mostly defensive ammunition, do so.
Big game rifles are used to hunt larger prey, such as wild boars and deer. You should have at least 100 to 200 rounds of ammo from game loads. The total of 100 shots itself can last for years hunting larger prey as its primary source of food, provided your rifle looks correctly and is handled correctly with great care. A good starting point is to have 500 rounds, 200 of which should be defensive ammunition, for each regularly used handgun.
This isn't the ultimate goal, it's where you start, which means you should plan to increase your ammo reserves by the thousands. Many experts recommend accumulating at least 1000 rounds of ammunition for each caliber of weapon you own. Even so, there is a minimum for which you must shoot, and that is to have at least a thousand bullets per caliber, or better yet, per gun. Follow these rules and your ammunition can be passed down from generation to generation and remain as good as new.
However, there are some general guidelines you can follow, but you should also remember to expect the unexpected, such as a severe ammunition shortage. If there is a threat of confiscation and seizure, I move ammunition stores to stashes and keep 2 basic loads within easy access. One hundred rounds of ammunition can be purchased per field charge for the shotgun for more than $20 so you can save costs. Basically, tell yourself that once a week, you'll walk into a sporting goods store and buy a box of ammo.
Nothing is more frustrating than the desire to go to the shooting range to have a little fun just to find excessively expensive or completely unavailable ammunition. On the rifle side, you'll see high-end hunting ammunition at 308 Winchester, 6.5 Creedmore, 338 Lapua, and others representing the New York strip and rib. But there is one way to overcome this dilemma, as long as you are patient, and that is to get used to buying only one or two boxes of ammunition a week. These are the issues to consider when making general calculations about the amount of ammunition you should have on hand.
Those 1 or 2 encounters, if conducted with multiple aggressors, could force you to burn dozens of magazines, if not hundreds of rounds of ammunition. I also wear clean white cotton gloves when filling the chests so that there is less chance of corrosion on the ammunition. And when there's a significant ammo shortage, you might not find any, or if you do, you'll end up limited to two boxes. It's an especially bad position to be from a defensive perspective, but it's also not good when it's hunting season and you don't have ammo at home and there's none in stores.
